Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky, 2020)
I’ve been a vegetarian since January of this year. Over lockdown most people I know have taken up new ethical stances and changed their political perspectives through months of housebound introspection. For me it was delving into animal rights and giving up meat. This journey into soy protein and browsing BBC Good Food at 2am for vegetarian recipes came with the essential documentaries: most notably Earthlings, Blackfish and Cowspiracy.
As an animal rights documentary Gunda really differentiates itself from the crowd. It’s arthouse to the core, a polar opposite to the conventional hidden camera footage and talking heads that define activist documentary - a film where precisely engineered formalism is just as important as the message.
Gunda moves at an incredibly slow and meditative pace. With its stark black and white cinematography and focus on everyday farm reality over heightened drama, it’s if Bela Tarr went vegan. Kossakovsky manufactures a slow burn character piece with no human characters.
In fact, the need for humanity is rejected to the point where the animals receive no anthropomorphising. There is no sound other than the diegetic farm noise and everything is shot from the animal’s perspectives with sweeping and smooth camera movement. Kossakovsky lifts from Bresson just as much as Tarr. Physical storytelling is the soul of Gunda with the animal’s bodies and their movement being paramount. The intelligent cinematography lets us read emotion with impressive clarity. It communicates a loose moving narrative with nothing but body language, incredibly impressive considering that this is non-human body language.
It does something very rare in the subgenre of animal rights documentary: it fully immerses the audience into the perspective of the farm animals. It allows the animals’ conditions and what is heart-breaking to touch the audience in an incredibly visceral way. We see the injustice of the farm industry from its victims rather than its political opponents. Cinema that can make you forget you’re watching a film is an achievement; cinema that can make you forget that you’re human is something so much more poetic.